How to Poach a Former Colleague Without Upsetting Your Ex-Boss

It helps to remember everyone in this situation is an adult

Published in

Forge

5 min readNov 21, 2019

Jessica Powell, the former Google vice president who wrote The Big Disruption and told you how to quit your job, is here to answer your common but tricky work questions. Check back every other week for more management advice with a tech inflection.

I’ve just started a new job that’s requiring me to make a few hires, and I’m trying to navigate poaching a former colleague. I know it would upset my former boss, who I’m on good terms with, but I feel like it would be a good fit for my new company and a great opportunity for the former colleague. What are the rules here?

Before you tie yourself in knots over this, put yourself in the employee’s shoes: Think how upset you would be to find out that someone didn’t offer you a job because they didn’t want to irritate your current boss. If it were me, I’d feel like a total cog in the wheel and would think less of the person for it.

A good manager will be upset about the loss of an employee, but will see the bigger picture. Lots of times, a new job is a better opportunity for the employee (think of someone who is moving from a middle manager position at a big company to running a department at a start-up). If a manager cares about the employee as a person — or hey, doesn’t care about them at all as a person, but cares about them as someone they might re-hire one day, or might be relevant to them for other work purposes — then they should let them take the job without raising a fuss.

But it sounds like you don’t think your former boss is going to be so Zen about the whole thing. No matter what you do, they’ll probably still be angry with you. Nevertheless, there are steps you can take to minimize their long-term irritation.

I think there are two ways to go about this. Both involve giving your former boss a heads up, because in my experience, few people like to be surprised when it comes to bad news.